His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives.

You can't build politics on love. People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance.

In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and thousands of years of humanity's dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made.

The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.